Your work matters.I’d like to help.

As a photojournalist and a writer, I aim to tell stories that are honest and compelling. If you or your organization are doing good work, I want to help tell your story.

NKCDC

New Kensington Community Development Corporation (NKCDC) has been working alongside residents and businesses in the Kensington, Fishtown and Port Richmond neighborhoods of Philadelphia since 1985. Its holistic vision of resident-driven community development includes community engagement, neighborhood planning, housing counseling, vacant land management, economic development and real estate development.

Indonesia

Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country. It’s as wide as the United States but strings its 3,000 miles across some 13,000 islands housing over 360 ethnic groups speaking 700+ languages.

Toraja is both a distinctive ethnic group and a mountainous region of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Torajans are known for maintaining a caste-based society, where “blue-blood” members of the community demonstrate their status (and support the local economy) by building distinctive horn-shaped ceremonial houses called tongkonan. Traditional tongkonan are constructed without metal hardware, and are used to display the horns and jawbones of animals slaughtered in family ceremonies—also a sign of status. At least two water buffalo must be killed to consecrate a tongkonan.

Funerals are an important focus of community life, lasting several days. Depending on a family's social status and the stature of the deceased, they require the slaughter of dozens of pigs and water buffalo, and the construction of a small village of temporary bamboo structures to host hundreds of guests.

Because funerals are astronomically expensive—a prize water buffalo can cost more than $60,000 US—funerals are delayed for months or even years until the family can afford them. In the meantime, the deceased is embalmed, referred to as "sick," and included in daily household activities in a kind of extended wake that boggles the North American mind.

Philadelphia Chamber Music Society

In 2016 I had the chance to work with writer Leah Hood on an unusual project for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. "Departure and Discovery: New Directions at the Apex of Creativity" explored the idea of "late style"—that is, what do artists create when they have nothing left to prove?

CADBI

On Mothers Day weekend, 2016, the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI) held a “Mothers Day Rally to Restore Families & Communities and Bring Our Loved Ones Home.” A diverse group, including mothers of prisoners, activists and concerned citizens, came out in the rain to deliver a Mothers Day card to District Attorney Seth Williams.

The City of Philadelphia—birthplace of American democracy and the only UNESCO World Heritage City in the U.S.—has sentenced more children to die in prison than anywhere else in the world. Some 500 adults, sentenced as minors, languish behind prison walls.

Recently the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatory Juvenile Life without Parole sentences are unconstitutional. While some Pennsylvania municipalities applied that ruling retroactively and moved quickly to make former juvenile offenders eligible for parole, Philadelphia has not.

CADBI was joined by multiple other organizations and the written statements of affected inmates in its appeal. Communications Director/Spokesperson Cameron Kline met us at the front door.

Code for Philly

Code for Philly is "an open team of web geeks, municipal programmers, technology insiders, and social entrepreneurs...dedicated to re-imagining city government through civic apps." They meet weekly in downtown Philadelphia. This weekend-long brainstorming and prototyping session called the Democracy Hackathon attracted the likes of Mayor Kenney, council members and Commissioner Al Schmidt.

LandHealth Institute

When the Appalachians were higher than the Rockies and North America was butting up against Africa, fearsome tectonic forces forged a kind of East Coast metamorphic rock known as schist.

Whole cities are built on schist.

In Philadelphia, you can drive through schist along the Schuylkill River. Kelly Drive bores straight through a big chunk of the stuff, presumably known as Glendinning Rock.

In the spring of 2016 I took a guided ramble on top of that rock with Scott Quitel, the curious and enthusiastic founder of LandHealth Institute.

We climbed over the Kelly Drive tunnel and stood even with Girard Avenue bridge, looking down at an overgrown park with a sign reading “Glendinning Rock Garden.”

“It’s amazing to think what was here before,” Scott said, pointing at stone foundations and old retaining walls. Vines sprouted from cement slabs. A spring cascaded down the hillside, bypassing the fountain designed to catch it.

The sign was ambiguous. Was the park originally designed as a rock garden? Or was it some other kind of garden, adjacent to Glendinning Rock?

But on the bare slope above, Scott pointed to ice plants scrabbling onto cracks in the sunlight. “These are the kind of plants you’d typically put in a rock garden. And no one planted them here—they're completely native.”

Palestine and Israel

“Welcome to where you are,” said Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger when we had seated ourselves under a canopy in Roots’ “Nonviolent Center,” a homey hodge-podge of sheds, artificial turf and cement in a sun-baked strip beside Highway 60, some 20 kilometers south of Jerusalem.

“It’s hard to find where you are because there are six or seven names and each name comes with a political ideology. We are in the West Bank, Palestine, the Occupied Territory, the Liberated Territory, the Contested Territory … and in Judea and Samaria. That is why we have no address.”

“I am a Jew, a Zionist and a settler,” Hanan said. “Now let me tell you what I mean by those words.” To be a Jew, he said, is not only a faith statement. It means to be tied to a people and to a land.

“The time has come for the Jewish people to reconsummate our relationship to this land,” he said. He described how Abraham, in his wandering from Ur to Canaan, would have passed very near to the place we were now sitting.

To be a settler “sounds like a wide-eyed radical political extremist,” Schlesinger said. “I am making a religious statement; I’m making a Jewish statement. … I’ve come to live here where the Jewish people was born.”

But there’s a problem, Hanan said. “That story—that Jewish settler story—has blinded me for most of my life to another story. I have literally not seen [Palestinians] for most of the 34 years I have lived here, until a year and a half ago.”

In early 2014, through meetings organized by Ali Abu Awwad, a gentle, lanky Palestinian man, Hanan had his first conversations with his Palestinian neighbors. He remembers being amazed that they had smartphones. “I was so confused that I’m meeting with the devil—and he’s not.”

By the same token, the Palestinians were amazed. “They said, ‘People like you walk around with submachine guns and kill our kids,’” Hanan reported.

Since that first encounter, Ali and Hanan have gone on speaking tours in the U.S. Roots continues its outreach in the Gush Etzion area of the West Bank with monthly meetings between Israeli and Palestinian families, a women's group, a summer camp, language classes and work with local leaders.

The solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will come through conversations that dispel fear, Roots believes. A political solution with “one state, two states, 100 states—it won’t work,” Ali said. “We need to create ‘not-marriage, not-divorce.’ Israelis have rights to the whole land. Palestinians have rights to the whole land.”

“To be able to have equality we need to have understanding. Not because we love each other, but because we have no choice.”

In August 2015 I joined a group of Jews and Christians on a tour of Israel and Palestine. The trip was facilitated by Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), “a faith-based organization that supports Palestinian-led, nonviolent, grassroots resistance to the Israeli occupation and the unjust structures that uphold it.”

Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, Gush Etzion

Ali Abu Awwad, Gush Etzion

Hebron, West Bank

Damascus Gate, Jerusalem

Aedicule, Church Of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem.

Aedicule, Church Of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, West Bank

Tel Rumeida, Hebron, West Bank

Mount of Olives from Bab Alsbat cemetery, Jerusalem

Hebron, West Bank

Lajee Center, Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem

Road to Hebron, West Bank

Tawfiq Natsheh, Hebron Glass and Ceramics Factory, Hebron, West Bank

Bethlehem, West Bank

Bir Nabala, West Bank

Near Bethlehem, West Bank

Hebron, West Bank

Hebron, West Bank

Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem

Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem

Susiya, West Bank

Tel Rumeida, Hebron

Fatima Nawaja, Susiya, West Bank

Nawal Slemiah with her children, Hebron, West Bank

Tel Rumeida, Hebron

Afaf Alwash, Jubbet adh Dhib, West Bank

Bethlehem, West Bank

Pennsylvania Association of Nonprofit Organizations

PANO is a statewide membership organization serving and advancing the nonprofit sector in Pennsylvania through advocacy, collaboration and education. Each year it hosts a Collaborative Conference in partnership with organizations across the state. Its vision is to amplify the impact of the “community benefit sector” by nurturing connections between nonprofit organizations, corporations and government.

Egypt

For two years I promoted Global Family, a program of Mennonite Central Committee that connects individual and corporate donors to about 100 schools, preschools and vocational training centers in 40 countries. As part of that work in 2014, I visited literacy classes, an after-school project and a girls’ home in Cairo and Upper Egypt.

Iceland

How big is Iceland? Three days before completing a two-week circuit of the ring road around the island, my companion and I learned that a volcano had erupted under a glacier, generating a flash flood that had taken out a main bridge. But not to worry; there would be an alternate route.

Two days before our vacation ended, we learned that cars were being loaded on flatbed trucks and passengers onto buses and the two vehicles were being driven across the shallow, gravelly river where the bridge used to be. We were assured this was quite safe.

A day before journey’s end, the news came that one of the buses had capsized in the river and passengers were being rescued by construction equipment.

At which point we turned around and drove our entire two week itinerary in reverse. It took 12 hours.

Blue Lagoon Geothermal Spa, Grindavík

Blue Lagoon Geothermal Spa, Grindavík

Dettifoss

Dettifoss

Dimmuborgir, Lake Mývatn

Geysir

Grjótagjá, Lake Mývatn

Grjótagjá, Lake Mývatn

Höfn

Höfn

Húsavík

Húsavík

Myrar area

Near Dettifoss

Öxi pass into Berufjördur peninsula

Route 42 near Grindavík

Selfoss

Route 42 near Grindavík

Reykjavik

Sey∂isfjiör∂ur

Route 1 near Krafla

Hallgrímskirkja, Reykjavik

Near Goðafoss

Rachel Zylstra

Rachel Zylstra is an independent singer-songwriter who released her fourth album in 2015. “Ben-Folds-meets-smoky-chanteuse-meets-orphan-train-alt-country-gal—with a dash of Sesame Street,” she says. She has played artist residencies at Rockwood Music Hall and The Sidewalk Cafe in New York and opened for American indie acts like David Bazan, Jay Brannan and Over the Rhine.

This series was made at the Hispanic Society of America—an enchanting Beaux Arts museum on West 155th Street, Manhattan—and at Old Town Bar, the pub on East 18th Street that opened in 1892.

Japan

The first effective treatment for Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) was discovered in the 1940s, but centuries of stigma took longer to treat. In Japan, as in the U.S., patients were often disowned by their families and forced to live in isolated communities. At Nagashima Aiseien—Japan’s first national leprosarium—overcrowding, forced labor, abortion and sterilization were common practice.

Japanese laws confining Hansen’s Disease patients were not repealed until 1996. Today, although former patients have won reparations from the government, the communities persist because their aging residents have no other home.

Nagashima Aiseien was among a dozen unusual stops on a 2007 tour of southern Japan facilitated by Gregory Vanderbilt, a Japanese history scholar.

• In Nagasaki we saw the point above which the atomic bomb detonated, as well as potent symbols of the city’s long Catholic history. Twenty-six Jesuits were crucified there in 1596.

• In the remote interior of Kyushu, Gregory introduced me to O Yasumi Dokoro, a bohemian retreat center for artists and intellectuals.

• And on Mount Koya we joined pilgrims visiting the center of Shingon Buddhism and the tomb of Kobo Daishi, who brought the practice to Japan in 805.

Nagashima Aiseien leprosarium, Honshu

Nagashima Aiseien leprosarium, Honshu

Nagashima Aiseien leprosarium, Honshu

Nagashima Aiseien, Honshu

Nagasaki Peace Memorial, Kyushu

Hiroshima, Honshu

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Honshu

Okonomiyaki restaurant, Hiroshima, Honshu

Himeji Castle, Honshu

Meiji Shrine, Tokyo

Imperial Palace, Kyoto, Honshu

Community festival, Otsu, Honshu

Kagoshima, Kyushu

Himeji, Honshu

Izumi, Kyushu

Mount Koya, Honshu

Osaka, Honshu

Capsule hotel, Nagasaki, Kyushu

Mizukami, Kyushu

Mizukami, Kyushu

Ishiyama Temple, Otsu, Honshu

Mount Koya, Honshu

Mount Koya, Honshu

Mount Koya, Honshu

Mount Koya, Honshu

Mount Koya, Honshu

Mount Koya, Honshu

Guatemala

The first time I visited Guatemala was in January 1991, a month after the Guatemalan Army opened fire on a crowd of unarmed civilians in Santiago Atitlán, killing 14 and wounding 21. Public outcry over that event marked a turning point in Guatemala’s decades-long civil war, which included the murder and “disappearance” of 200,000 indigenous people, activists, academics, journalists and students at the hands of the military, police and intelligence services.

Guatemala—especially the tourist town of Antigua—is known for its expansive and elaborate Holy Week celebrations. Returning there in 2009 I was struck by how the country’s tortured history resonates through its portrayal of biblical death and resurrection. On Good Friday people use colored sand, sawdust and flower petals to create meticulous alfombras in the middle of the street. These fragile carpets are laid down in advance of church processions that carry floats in devotion to biblical figures and motifs. Men, women and children stay up all hours to complete their carpet. Each piece is destroyed when a procession walks over it.